Welcome to ListenBrainz!

The ListenBrainz project is similar to the original AudioScrobbler®. Unlike
the original project, ListenBrainz is open source and will publish its data as
open data.

A team of former Last.fm and current MusicBrainz
hackers created the first version of ListenBrainz in the space of a weekend. Since
the original project was created, technology has advanced at an incredibly
rapid pace, which made re-creating the original project fairly straightforward.

The project has two main goals:

Allow users to preserve their existing Last.fm® data. ListenBrainz is
operated by the MetaBrainz Foundation which
has a long-standing history of curating, protecting and making data
available to the public. MetaBrainz commits itself to safe-guarding the
ListenBrainz data indefinitely.

Make this incredibly useful music usage data available to anyone who cares to
play with it. We hope that the combination of ListenBrainz, MusicBrainz and
AcousticBrainz will provide enough
data for developers to create new music recommendation systems. Music recommendation
systems are hard to develop because comprehensive music data sets do not
exist in the open. Normally start-ups spend vast amounts of money to create
these data sets before building recommendation systems. We aim to short-cut
this process and put the power to create recommendation engines into the hands
of everyone. We plan to release the data under the
CC0 License.

For more information about this project and its goals, please take a look at our
goals page.

At this point the project is in its infancy -- we have lots of things that will
need to be built and improved before this project will be useful to the general
public. If you are a hacker and interested in helping out, please have a look
at the code repository
or come visit us in the #metabrainz IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.